The Grace Hopper Celebration brings together talented women in the areas of data and technology, from all over the world, for a 4-day conference filled with inspiring panels, presentations, mentoring and networking opportunities. The purpose was to offer an array of important resources to help women succeed in their careers and gain visibility into the industry. The world’s largest gathering of women technologists, the conference brought together 26,000 attendees from 90 countries in 2019.
Highlighting Our Top Talent
2019 marks our sixth straight year of attending Grace Hopper. This year, for the first time, two of our female engineers took to the stage to share their insights, expertise and personal stories to help educate and empower women in tech.
- Stephanie Yang, Senior Staff Engineer – hosted a solo talk on making better predictive models, and participated in a panel about careers in data science (you can read more about these sessions below):
Three Tips for Better Predictive Models – how to increase the effectiveness of predictive models by optimizing metrics, investing in feature engineering, and examining data.
Demystifying Careers in Data Science – discussing the relationship between industry and the phrase “data science,” including how to navigate one’s career in an ever-changing field and how to manage expectations.
“I want everyone to manage expectations. I hear every week that someone wants to go into data science in order to ‘do more machine learning.’ Be aware that data scientists and machine learning engineers still spend most of their time cleaning and transforming data, not building new algorithms.” – Stephanie Yang, Senior Staff Engineer
- Christine Wang, Client Solutions Engineer – hosted a solo talk geared towards working moms in the tech industry: How I made a Mom-Back in the Tech Industry – discussing the higher risk for career interruptions and navigating through the re-entry process, reducing the impact of “the motherhood penalty”.
“Mothers in particular are three to five times more likely than fathers to quit their jobs due to increasing gender wage gaps. In fact, women in the tech industry have the highest rate of leaving the workforce after having kids.” – Christine Wang, Client Solutions Engineer
The speakers received positive feedback both onsite and on social media, which encouraged candidates to visit our booth to learn more about what we do, and explore open opportunities at Foursquare. By the way, did we mention that we’re hiring?
Main Takeaways
The key takeaway from this conference was the need for more opportunities where women can speak about their career experiences and showcase support for other women in the technology industry.
Highlighting our talented technical women and their achievements supports our stance in promoting diversity and inclusion. Our team was so inspired to see just how many talented female technologists, from college students to the more experienced, are in the field and ready to be hired.
Here are some other key takeaways:
- Stephanie Yang and Christine Wang reached an estimated 1,100 women through the three talks/panels they presented in GHC
- The Foursquare team spoke with more than 250 people at our career booth and received 30 resumes for our engineering internship program and other roles
- Bringing our technical women together from all of our offices helped build stronger relationships and boost team morale
The Foursquare team looks forward to being back at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) again next year to further encourage more female leaders to join the movement and pave the way for other women in the industry.
If you are interested in data science or engineering roles, join us and help Foursquare ‘Invent the Future’ by visiting our job portal here.
